Ireland’s referendum results signal seismic change
It is a measure of how fast political control is slipping away from the elites that, over a period of just four days, the Irish government was heavily defeated in two referenda designed to progress its liberal agenda, the right-wing Chega party increased its number of parliamentary seats from 12 to 48 in the Portuguese general election and Lee Anderson defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK.
So far as any element of surprise attended these three events, Anderson’s defection was hardly unexpected, only the scale of Chega’s success was startling, but the No/No landslide in the two Irish referenda was a huge surprise to the elites promoting constitutional change.
To put the national repudiation of the Irish establishment by the electorate in perspective, it is worth recalling that all political parties represented in the Dáil except one (the miniscule Aontú, with a solitary representative) supported a Yes vote, as did Ireland’s powerful NGOs and all the mainstream media, while the opinion polls equally unanimously forecast the two proposed constitutional amendments would pass easily.
Both amendments were represented by the government as a tidying-up exercise, the removal of outdated or “sexist” language from the constitution. The proposal for a 39th Amendment to the constitution was to remove the status accorded to marriage. The constitution declares the family to be “the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law”.
One can imagine how that forthright assertion of the Christian ethic goes down in Brussels, the real seat of Irish governance. But it gets worse: “The state pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of marriage, on which the family is founded, and to protect it against attack.” The ruling elites quickly determined such an embarrassing notion must be replaced by the imprecise concept of “durable relationships”. When challenged on the precise meaning of this term, government spokesmen were unable to give a clear definition.
The proposal for a 40th Amendment was to delete from the constitution Article 41.2.1, which states that “woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and guarantees, on behalf of the state, that “mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.
The proposal was to replace this “outdated” terminology with gender-neutral language. Much was made by proponents of the change of the supposedly “sexist” notion of women “in the home”, as if the existing constitutional provision chained Irish women to a kitchen sink, when they should be out breaking glass ceilings in the boardroom of a widget manufacturing company, instead of doing something trivial like raising children.
As a smokescreen for its real intentions, the government held the joint referenda on International Women’s Day and on the friday before Mothering Sunday. As opponents were quick to point out, this was hardly appropriate when their intention was to remove the terms “woman” and “mothers” from Article 41, to be replaced by gender-neutral language, in accordance with woke prescriptions. Under the patronising pretence of somehow emancipating women from the supposed slights visited upon them by a constitution written in 1937, the real intention was to remove recognition of women and motherhood from the text.
The organisation The Countess, campaigning for women’s rights, denounced the hypocrisy of the government. It pointed out that the 1937 constitution does not force women to stay at home: they are prominent in every profession and in public life – Ireland has had two women presidents. What it does do is afford them protection if they wish to stay at home and raise their children. The most recent opinion polls show that 69 per cent of Irish mothers would prefer to do so, rather than go out to work.
For a government bound by its constitution to afford mothers that facility, that is unwelcome news. So, under the cover of a supposedly emancipatory amendment, the government sought to weasel out of that commitment by instead binding itself merely by a vague aspiration that the state “shall strive to support” the provision of family-based care. That word “strive”, potentially substituting good intentions for delivery, alerted the electorate to what the government was up to.
Everyone associated with caring of any kind was alarmed by the threatened resiling by the government from a constitutional obligation to support care. This was aggravated when the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, interviewed on Virgin Media One, speaking about caring for his family members, said: “I don’t actually think that’s the state’s responsibility to be honest. I think it’s very much a family responsibility.”
Of course, ideally, care should be given in the home, by family members. But there was clearly a much broader implication to Varadkar’s words and it set alarm bells ringing among carers of every kind. This insight into the possible consequences of the 40th Amendment, if passed, for respite care, support for independent living, personal assistance services and a host of other facilities, if the government were to be let off the constitutional hook, caused widespread concern.
The proposed amendments had a double purpose. The first was to complete the process of secularisation and repudiation of Ireland’s Catholic past, already largely accomplished by referendum victories for the progressives on same-sex marriage and abortion. This is an obsession of the Brussels-compliant ruling elites. In the words of Paul Kingsnorth, writing in UnHerd: “The governing classes of the Emerald Isle now define themselves against everything they used to be.”
Kingsnorth also pointed out that, if the public voted to pass the amendments, they would find “that women have been ‘liberated’ from their right to bring up their own children in their own home, rather than being forced into the market economy by a state which has no interest in anything beyond economic growth and a desire to seem ‘progressive’ in the eyes of its EU neighbours”.
The Irish public was not slow to recognise the influence of globalist NGOs in pushing for this elimination of the concept both of womanhood and motherhood from the constitution. Ireland, with a population of just five million, is home to 34,000 NGOs. The most active in the Yes/Yes referendum cause was the National Women’s Council of Ireland, an increasingly radical campaigning organisation, crassly unrepresentative of Irish women, as the referenda outcome demonstrated. In 2021, of its income of €1,139,544, as much as 84.5 per cent, or €962,791, came from the Irish taxpayers, courtesy of the government. If the denizens of Leinster House are relying on the National Women’s Council to inform them of the views and aspirations of Irish women, they are sadly misguided.
The rejection of these proposals by the electorate was the biggest and most emphatic in the history of Irish referenda. On a respectable turnout, as Leo Varadkar conceded, of 44.4 per cent, the proposed 39th amendment, relating to marriage, was defeated by 67.7 per cent to 32.3 per cent, or by 1,021,546 votes to 487,564. The No vote carried 38 of the 39 constituencies: only in elite-residing Dún Laoghaire did Yes scrape a victory by a margin of 0.6 per cent. In Donegal, the No vote was 80.2 per cent.
On the proposed 40th Amendment, relating to mothers, the family and the duty of care, the rejection was even more sweeping, with No carrying all 39 constituencies, even Dún Laoghaire. The No vote was 73.9 per cent, Yes 26.1 per cent, representing 1,114,620 votes to 393,053. In Donegal the No share of the vote reached 84 per cent, which suggests the members of the National Women’s Council do not get out much in that part of the country.
What is the significance of this extraordinary reversal of the recent liberal trend in Irish suffrage? There appear to have been several strands operating simultaneously. The first and most obvious is that the large majority of those who voted – contrary to the alibis being confected by politicians with egg on their faces – understood quite clearly what was being proposed and objected to it: they did not want to see marriage, family, women and motherhood banished from their constitution.
That suggests that, after recent decades, the long rage against the Catholic past, the materialism of the Celtic Tiger economy and the almost jejune aspiration to imitate the progressivism of Brussels has largely burned itself out. The world is an increasingly frightening place and that may have persuaded many Irish voters of the need to cling onto what remains of their roots, tradition and identity.
The rejection of Catholicism, in the official narrative, was triggered by the clerical sex abuse scandal. But there was a chicken-and-egg effect in that phenomenon. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the abandonment of catechesis and reverential worship, along with more relaxed moral attitudes, created the climate in which abuse proliferated. Attendance at Sunday Mass in Ireland in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the Council, was 91 per cent. In 1983, the year when the 8th Amendment to the constitution, prohibiting abortion – reversed 35 years later – was passed, the figure was 87 per cent.
Today it is 30 per cent, with an interesting anomaly: of those Catholics who returned to Mass after the Covid lockdown, another blow to church attendance, 66 per cent are men and 52 per cent women. That is in contrast to religious observance patterns almost everywhere else in the world, where women vastly outnumber men in the pews. It suggests that aggressive feminism, with its anti-religious bias, has influenced Irish women significantly; yet the referenda results indicate that precisely that brand of feminism is faltering in Ireland and being replaced by a more balanced and purposeful pursuit of policies beneficial to women, including within the family.
In any case, it would be inaccurate to suggest some kind of religious reaction has taken place; on the other hand, it is credible to interpret the result as revolution fatigue setting in and a desire for renewed stability. In that context there is an elephant in the room: Ireland is being subjected to massive, unsustainable immigration, against which there is mounting opposition. Since it is being promoted by the same agencies that supported the proposed constitutional amendments – Brussels, the political class, the NGOs, the legacy media – it seems highly likely that a further motivation for No voters was to strike a blow against those forces.
That is likely to carry over to the local and European elections. The extreme Hate laws that the Irish government is introducing – so extravagant that they may be challenged in the ECHR – have aroused real fear of the total suppression of free speech. With immigration becoming an ever more inflammatory issue, a cack-handed attempt to suppress debate, rather than confront issues that are impacting the everyday lives of Irish citizens, could provoke serious civil unrest.
The plain fact is that history is moving on, in Portugal, Britain and Ireland, with growing evidence that the current elites are on the wrong side of that history. In the meantime, people will scan the Irish statute book in vain for the 39th and 40th Amendments to the constitution: those slots remain vacant.
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